Gene Balk of the Seattle Times talks about stats to watch for in 2023. Our team would like to take a deeper dive into this and see if our audience would like to know more.
Balk first discusses Downtown workers. He mentions that the recovery to a flourishing downtown has been a struggle across the board for Americans. However, Seattle seems to have a few positive KPIs that are trending upward. One is the return of monthly downtown visitors. The increase for hotel stays and rooms came back referencing June 2021, stay occupancy was at 96% comparatively in the same month in 2019. This could be a result of the pandemic loosening up.
Although all signs point to increased tourism, one metric that remains to be unchanged is the return to work for office workers. In a recent mention, Elon Musk did let go of 200 employees and shuttered all janitorial staff in Seattle’s Twitter offices having employees needing to fend for their own toilet paper.
Balk mentions that month-over-month return of the office workforce increased only until September when percentages appear to drop. Then steadily return in November of 2022. This information has come from Placer.ai, a national firm that provides foot-traffic analytics.
Another metric pointed out was Seattle’s population growth. According to the piece, Seattle was the fastest-growing big U.S. city in the 2010s gaining more than 100,000 in population over the course of the decade.
Seattle came to a screeching halt when losing nearly 4,300 people which was a 0.6% decline the article mentions. Looks like the Census Bureau 2022 population data for cities will be released in May.
Finally, Balk’s last point talks about inflation and the cost of living. As with the rest of the nation, Seattle is not immune to the increase of inflation and Seattle already had a high cost of living to begin with. He mentions that the common goods of 59 items had increased by 10%. From Margarine to Gas.
We’d like to know from those reading this post are things picking up again? How are businesses doing? We’re hoping that as things return to normal, we’ll see much stronger metrics and a return to normalcy for Seattle in the coming years. Only time will tell.
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